Digital Learning Choiceboard Tools To Support: SEL, Special Education, Student Feedback, World Language
December Choice Board Tools & Resources 2021
This video is an overview of a digital learning choice board with a wide range of tools that are apps, resources, and extensions. In the ELA category is Flipgrid as you can empower students with their voice, and also encourage understanding comprehension of student writing and you can have students record what they read with other students. You can have students express their voice, read other writing, share, give feedback, it's overall a great tool. You're able to have a group of students record videos that get all curated together where they can then watch other videos and give feedback.
The next tool is Historyview.org. This is a very cool tool that has curated images and VR experiences based on geographic location for free. This is an easy way to bring historical sites and museums to the classroom. VR headsets are not required to experience the resource and it works on all devices. In the video, I visit a location in Africa and view the images of a museum.
Desmos is a free suite of math software tools. The cool thing about Desmos is that you can use Desmos to also track student progress and in the video, I share an example on Parabolas. Desmos has a built-in graphing calculator and also a scientific calculator as well. Many math teachers are already aware of this tool but I know they're continually expanding the problem sets that they're adding, and also the different types of calculators.
In the area of Assistive Technology is Google Read & Write. This is an extension that you add to Google Chrome for students using a Chromebook or on a teacher device that can read the text to the student when selected, they can also color code the text when it's read. This tool provides text to speech in the classroom as a teaching tool and can support the student with the teacher or the student can use this on their own. This is an add-on and it needs to be enabled within the organization if you are a Google Education School. There are free accounts for teachers that are available if you contact a representative from a reseller Google Read & Write.
A world language resource is Easy Accents. This is a tool in which where you insert accents for different languages directly from the sidebar of Google Docs. This is another add-on and basically, when someone is working on a Google Doc and typing in a different language, this allows them to have different types of accents, whether it's French accents or Spanish accents. These aren't always readily available on the local keyboard unless you change a keyboard language setting.
DBQ Online is a Social Studies tool that allows students to be able to do research, take notes, annotate documents and then formulate their notes so that they can then write research papers and also right in the online cloud environment.
Google Arts and Culture is a very cool website. This site has games and it also allows students to engage with artwork from around the world with virtual museums and artists. There are amazing resources to learn about art mediums movements, historical events, and political figures. You can also favorite art, artists, and location like a lot of other tools, learn about art museum exhibitions near you.
For Social Emotional Learning there is the EverFi scenario-based digital SEL curriculum EverFi is a free digital resource that is available for K-12 schools. They have a scenario-based K through 12 social and emotional learning curriculum that you can embed in with your teaching, for elementary, middle, and high school. A wide range of tools and options are available. Its a great option if you're looking for some resources related to social-emotional learning that you want to bring into the classroom and they also have an amazing digital citizenship curriculum and financial literacy curriculum.
That's just a quick roundup of some amazing tools on the digital choice board for December. I'll put the link in the description of this video for the board.